VALENTINE'S DAY IN TEXAS

Well, since I don't get to be a lovebird this Valentine's Day (I'm at a conference in Texas while Jay is home working and holding down the fort), I guess I'll just have to share some photos of new birds I've seen on my first trip here to the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

The 4th International Partner's In Flight Conference is in McAllen, TX this year (it's not an annual event, the 1st was in 1992, the 2nd was in 1995, and the 3rd was in 2002), an excellent place for birding! The conference sessions officially started today, but I showed up a day early to attend a raptor banding field trip and the opening reception. Bill Clark took about a dozen of us out to the sugar cane fields yesterday morning, where they had already burned and were busy harvesting. Raptors LOVE this! (So do vultures, etc.) As the big machines roll by and scare the small mammals out of the cane, the birds swoop in to reep the bounty (it's kind of like watching the fire-line in south Florida, as the egrets walk the line capturing every frog, snake, and grasshopper that tries to outrun the flames). I've NEVER seen so many raptors in one place, and there were lots of different kinds! The new one for me was the White-tailed Hawk, but the Crested Caracaras were pretty amazing too (I've never seen more than one at a time before this). Bill had captured a juvenile female White-tailed Hawk right before we showed up, so he hung on to her to show us.

We learned all about how to catch hawks, in a trap that looks like this, with a sparrow and a mouse placed inside for bait (the hawk's legs get caught in the string):

Since hawks have large talons and beaks, the safest way to handle them when trying to apply a band and get other measurements is to place them head-first into a large cardboard tube with mesh at one end. It looks something like this:

Here is an up-close view of her pretty face:

Here is Craig Farquhar holding her for a stock photo:

This is me holding my first raptor (and one of the rarest to be seen in the US at that!):

Here's a shot of some of the hawks, vultures, caracaras, etc. swarming over the fields:

I saw a couple other new birds out in those fields: Sprauge's Pipit and Horned Lark (sorry, no pictures).

After we got back to McAllen, I registered for the conference, then headed down to Anzalduas County Park to hunt for Green Jays and other new birds. I saw the Green Jays, but nothing else new.

This morning I started my day at the Quinta Mazatlan World Birding Center here in McAllen. What an amazing piece of property! It's like a luxury resort for birds... there is food and shelter for just about every type of local bird (hummingbird feeders by the dozens, orange slices hanging from the trees, bird seed scattered on every available surface, bird feeders of every shape and size, misters, fountains, ponds, branch piles, and more plant species than I'll ever know!) I was able to spot 6 new birds: Great Kiskadee, Plain Chachalaca, Long-billed Thrasher, Olive Sparrow, Clay-colored Robin, and Buff-bellied Hummingbird. The first 2 species were all over the place, I didn't even have to hunt. I saw a pair of the thrashers flipping leaf piles under some dense trees, the Olive Sparrow was hopping around on the path, and the Clay-colored Robin was hiding in some bushes. I had to go back in the afternoon to find the Buff-bellied Hummingbird. I have pictures of the Kiskadee and Chachalaca (but they're not very good):